Why Some Men Don’t Help Their Wives With Household Chores

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By Toby Jones

Husbands and wives find all sorts of ways to get on each other’s nerves. Whether it’s leaving the toilet seat up, turning the thermostat above 68, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink, at some point all those living in marital bliss have to come to terms with the give and take of sharing the same living space. Perhaps the most common complaint women have about their male partners is their failure to help with the household chores.

Here are a few reasons male partners can be so reluctant to assist in these important and necessary household chores. They questions is are they acceptable to women?

“My Dad Never Did Any of That Stuff!”

As the old adage goes, “Like father like son.” Men in marriage take their cues from dear old dad. Since this role modeling is largely imprinted at the unconscious level, many men, particularly from earlier generations, won’t even be aware that the reason they aren’t pitching in with the household chores is that they rarely saw their own fathers doing so. Thus it is important for wives to at least be aware that a man’s sense of the “correct” division of labor may have come from his family of origin, from what he saw and experienced as a boy.

“I Bust my Butt at the Office All Day! Home is for Relaxing!”

Men who work out of the house full time often have the sense that the home is for relaxing. Never mind that their wives may also work out of the home just as hard and just as many hours. The available studies showing how much more housework married women do than married men should at least make one wonder whether the “a man’s house is his castle” attitude still predominates, despite all the changes in women’s roles and in society’s attitudes toward those roles.

“I’m No Good at Cooking and Cleaning. I Wouldn’t Know How!”

Men think their wives are “just better” at this sort of thing. Men think their wives are “just better” at this sort of thing.

Even grown men can be surprisingly insecure about doing things that they are not particularly good at. If they haven’t done a lot of cooking, for example, in the course of their lives, they aren’t apt to want to cook for others when the risk and fear of failure seem high. This general lack of experience, coupled with the fact that such chores don’t strike them as particularly fun or interesting, may lead them to be more apt to help with the dishes.

Men Just ‘Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ From Doing Housework

A final piece to the puzzle of understanding a man’s reluctance to pitch in around the house is the fact that his attitude about housework is quite different from his spouse’s. Studies show that women tend to find a greater degree of satisfaction from chores around the house than men do. Steven E. Rhoads, professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, did a study of professor couples. His hypothesis was that such couples with such equal and supposedly enlightened careers would be much more apt to achieve equality in doing chores in their homes. But his hypothesis didn’t hold up. He found, as other studies of ‘less equal’ couples have, that men are not as interested in housework as women. None of these studies should be taken to mean that women enjoy the housework more; they don’t. They just seem to have more interest in it and derive a different sort of satisfaction from it.